I caught an NPR discussion today featuring Anna Greenberg, Dem pollster, and Kellie Ann Somebody, Repub pollster.
Greenberg said that the "Security Mom" meme was a Repub theme designed to keep the campaign issues on safe territory for Bush. She admitted that there were conservative, white, middle-class women who fit that description--- but that they were a minority and ALREADY in Bush's camp.
Greenberg said that Kerry was "under-performing" in appealing to a much larger group who defined "security" in economic terms: jobs, affordable medical care, and safe retirement.
It may have been large part spin but she left me feeling a lot better and helped me in targeting pro-Kerry messages to these women.
The American Prospect offers the following explanation of the "security mom" meme.
http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/09/<...>
The inventor of the term is Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden, who first used the term, as far as I've been able to ascertain, in testimony on January 28, 2003 to criticize Bush in advance of the Iraq War for confusing and scaring women who just want to keep their children safe into thinking they needed to back the war. Biden later used to term as part of his critique of Congressional Democrats, who tried to bracket homeland security issues during the 2002 mid-term election campaigns, instead of talking about them head-on.
Time magazine writer Joe Klein soon noted that in his February 2003 column on the topic:
Nearly half the American women polled in October by the Gallup Organization say they believe they or someone in their family will soon be victims of an attack (about a third of men do too). But polls don't convey the intensity of these fears. "When I was out campaigning last fall, this was all women wanted to talk about," says Senator Joe Biden of Delaware. "Not schools, not prescription drugs. It was 'What are you doing to protect my kids against terrorists?' Soccer moms are security moms now."
<...>
Biden and Klein were right to recognize that even the most traditional Democratic constituencies, in the post-Sept. 11 world, now cared about security issues in a new way, and that there are very big difference between national security, foreign policy, and homeland security anxieties that polls often don't bother to tease out. For example, if you ask women and men what issue matters most to them, men are more likely to cite national security or terrorism as a priority than are women. But ask people how worried they are about being a terrorist attack victim and most studies on the topic show that women are much more worried than men. The intensity is different, and the focus of that intensity is different, too. The Bushies understand this and have frutifully deployed this nuanced understanding of the electorate to shore up their support with conservative and married women by talking homeland security and about how they'll keep families and children safe. Democrats have been a bit less adept at gendering their security talk to boost support among the subset of women that comprises their traditional base.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(295 posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
